Parashat Bereshit - Lilith

            Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Bereshit, the first portion of the new cycle of scriptural readings, the beginning of the whole thing, and by thing, I mean universe. The first two chapters of Genesis tell slightly different stories of how the world and everything in it came to be. Most notable is the discrepancy in the telling of how humans are created.

            In the first chapter, God says on the 6^th day, “Let us make mankind in our image. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep upon the earth,” and the Torah continues, “And God created humankind in God’s image. In the image of God, God created it; male and female God created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fertile and increase; fill the earth and master it.”

            Chapter two starts off as though it were a continuation or culmination of this version of events, but then verse four starts a new telling in which man is created first and then the plants and such are brought up in the garden around him, and woman appears to be an afterthought all the way down in verse twenty-two. Whereas in chapter one, we are told simply that God created, in much the same way that God said, “Let there be light” and then there was light and humankind seems to be similarly spoken into existance, in chapter two, we are told exactly how man and woman are each created.

            Because of the vagueness of the wording in each telling, one student at Gesher a couple of years ago drashed that there really was no discrepancy. Chapter one merely tells the macro-view of creation, and chapter two includes the details of how and why and more of God’s inner monologue. I found that a compelling explanation. Another possible explanation from a different Gesher student that year was that the first two humans were created agender and asexual, the way fetuses are formed with all the same things at first and sex characteristics form closer to birth, and develop only at puberty. Only as they began to develop personalities and construct their gender and sexual identities did they truly become “man” and “woman”, “Adam” and “Eve”. This midrash is not so different from one from the classical rabbis, which posited that the first human was essentially a man and a woman stuck together back-to-back, like an intersex version of the Roman god Janus, and were later split into two people of separate genders. The official academic and historical explanation is that chapter one was written in the early Israelite days in Canaan when our ancestors were influenced by the goddess cults of the land, and chapter two was written in the first exile when our ancestors were influenced by the more patriarchal pantheons of Babylonia. They were likely first combined in the Second Temple period and editors over many generations made attempts to smooth out inconsistencies, but some details snuck through and made it into the Masoretic texts which set the Biblical Canon we’ve known for over a thousand years.

            My favorite midrash on this, though, is the creation of Lilith. There are many stories about Lilith, varying thoughts about her historical origins, and visions of her as a demoness, a sympathetic victim, a feminist icon, a mother, a baby-killer, a licentious creature that mates with demons, centaurs, and satyrs, a tender lesbian lover, a crone, a seductress. We will talk more about all of that on Sunday at the adult break out group during our Fantastic Jewish Beasts event. We will read the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the earliest written Lilith story as a Bereshit midrash, which explains that on the 6^th day of creation, God created Adam and Lilith together. Because they were created simultaneously, Lilith thought they should be equals. Adam did not like that and they fought. Lilith summons magical powers by saying aloud the ineffable name of God, and vanishes from the Garden. God tries to compel her to go back but she will not and so God condemns her to have hundreds of babies a day, and for 100 of her children to die daily. God then sets about making a new, more subservient, mate for Adam. More stories spin out from this one, and there is academic speculation about the oral stories that inspired this written tale, but that’s pretty much all the detail offered in this piece of writing that dates to somewhere around the end of the first millennium CE. In a book I read this week, called Which Lilith, one of the contributing writers points out that this story starts out sympathetic to Lilith, understanding that maybe this is simply a broken relationship of incompatible people without necessarily needing a villain, but then the punishment for Lilith exerting her freewill is so dramatic that it seems we are to understand her as villainous, thus connecting this first woman to a pre-existing ancient Near Eastern demoness and inspiring further tales of her frightening existence. There are so many layers to Lilith’s mythos and so many voices we know are missing from the historical records, that it is very difficult to truly comprehend what we are meant to glean from this midrash. Variations of this midrash are so pervasive, that it is also hard to understand the differences between Genesis one and two without inserting this other woman in there somehow.

            All midrash is meant to be a window into an ancient and fairly incomprehensible text. The Tanakh is filled with stories that lack significant details, as well as bits of conflicting information. We need midrash to help us make sense of these things. The classic midrash helps significantly. We revere our ancient and medieval rabbis who set the tone for modern Judaism, and we trust their wisdom almost as much as we sacralize the Tanakh itself. Their stories can offer us satisfactory explanations or can open new questions that allow us to get deeper into our own interpretations than we maybe would by only looking at the surface of the Biblical texts. But they are also products of their time as much as the ancient scriptures are products of theirs. We see the influences of the time period and the ruling parties in the rabbis’ various geographical locations at their time of writing. Digging through the history of Lilith has been one excellent case study on that reality. This is one of the many reasons that each Jew is encouraged to reinterpret the texts for themselves and to come up with new midrash in every generation. The Tanakh is a living document and the Talmud has given us an open canon. It is best done with serious inquiry, and sincere inspection of the voices that have been recorded before us, but it is available to all. The only rule of Midrash is that it cannot contradict information from the Tanakh. It can build in missing details, offer up dramatic tales to connect seemingly dissonant information in the Tanakh, and it can most definitely contradict even the most popular classical midrash. But it may not deny something specified in the original texts. With that being the only rule, and with so much material to draw from, the Tanakh is our playground. These characters are our action figures. We have so much room to interpret and create and recreate whole worlds.

            This Shabbat Bereshit, learn from the Ultimate Creator, and build up something new from our ancient sources. And may you be blessed with creations varied and rewarding. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

           

Shabbat Sukkot

            Shabbat Shalom! This week we celebrate Sukkot, a time of great uncertainty in our ancestors’ history, and a thanksgiving of our bounty even in times of scarcity. These themes are resonating especially deeply with me personally this year. As many of you know, I traveled to my childhood home this week to help provide some support to my parents while my father recovered from a significant surgery. We are filled with gratitude for all the blessings and well-wishes from friends and family, grateful to the doctors and nurses who are able to be God’s hands in healing, and just so relieved that everything went so smoothly.

            So often we take our health and our loved ones for granted. We expect that what we need will always be there and sometimes even when it isn’t we might find ourselves responding with entitled demands instead of grit and patience. When the Israelites left Egypt, despite their freedom and safety awarded to them by God, they whined about the lack of meat and feared their wandering huts would not protect them from the desert heat. In the holiday reading for Sukkot Shabbat, Moses demands to see God’s face despite having already seen so many of God’s wonders. Sometimes it’s only when the things closest to our hearts are in peril that we realize how precarious life can be, and how truly fortunate we are when we are able to get the support and stability that we need to live long, healthy, happy lives.

            This Sukkot, take stock of the things in your life that sustains and comforts you. Remember to be grateful for what you have and keep ever striving to help others find that which they need to sustain themselves as well. May we all find ourselves protected by the shelter of Shekhina this fall and throughout the year.

Parashat Ha'azinu

Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Ha’azinu, is one of the last in the whole Torah. Next week, we will read the final commandments given to the Israelites in the desert, we will read of Moses’s death, and then a week from Sunday we will reroll the scroll and begin again with the reading of Genesis. This week is Moses’s ethical will, the final poetic address he will give to the people of Israel, the wrapping up of his Deuteronomy-long list of final instructions. The moment has come finally for Joshua to step into his leadership role, for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land, for this people who have gone through a spiritual adolescence these last 40 years to step into adulthood and prepare to take responsibility for their own tribes, their own relationships with God, and their own stake in the Holy Land. God and Joshua will continue to help them, of course, but never again will there be a prophet like Moses who speaks to God face-to-face and so carefully takes the People of Israel by the hand to lead them through difficult times.

Tomorrow we will celebrate a Bar Mitzvah at Ner Shalom. With this public act of leading his congregation in worship and teaching them some Torah, he will demonstrate that he is ready to follow in the footsteps of the Israelites as we see them in this parasha, a parasha which the Bar Mitzvah will likely feel connected to as he continues on his Jewish journey. Of course, we now understand developmental psychology a little better now than our ancient rabbis who instituted the Bar Mitzvah ceremony did, and we don’t expect 13-year-olds to fully be responsible adults. Parents, teachers, and other real adults will still need to continue to support and guide our B’nai Mitzvah adolescents as they continue to develop their own sense of self-responsibility, community building, spirituality, and find their own way in the world. But the Bar Mitzvah ceremony is the moment that Jewish youth step into religious adulthood and prepare to start their own exploration of what kind of person and Jew they want to be.

For the rest of us, it’s never too late to reset and work on these things for ourselves. We can always reflect and take accountability for our actions in new ways, we can always heighten our leadership skills, we can always deepen our own relationship with our history, culture, community, and faith. May we embrace these challenges as they arise and strengthen our resilience, and work together to create a Holy Land wherever we live. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.